Seagate to Stop Production of 7200 RPM Notebook Drives by End of This Year

Seagate Technology recently announced that it will stop production of notebook mechanical drives with 7200 RPM speeds. One of the largest hard drive manufacturers is making this step to move towards hybrid drive solutions.

This is confirmed as Seagate’s Director of Marketing and Product Management, David Burks, told X-Bit labs,”We are going to stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013.”

This may be a strange move one would expect from a company that thrives by manufacturing mechanical storage drives, but on the other hand, if you’re looking from a performance perspective, SSDs have a significant advantage over 7200RPM drives. On top of it, many manufacturers are also pushing mSATA SSD and caching SSD drives for notebooks and ultrabooks, meaning that 7200 RPM drives may be extremely difficult or practically impossible to have a modest sales figures to continue forward. Not to mention that with interfaces with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0, many users would be tempted to go for a faster but lower capacity drive and maybe cheaper SSD for keeping their operating systems and some of the their software and the rest of the data on an external storage device. Now that USB 3.0 notebooks and ultrabooks and storage devices are commonly available, many will not have to worry about the stifled speed that USB 2.0 has.

It is reported that Seagate will be ceasing production of Momentus 7200.4, Momentus 7200.2 and Momentus Thin notebook mechanical drive lineups. The storage giant also said that they will be focusing a lot on Momentus XT drives. To those who don’t know, Momentus XT series are drives with a spindle drive and a small SLC NAND Read-Only flash. It’s a speculation, but one couldn’t help but hope that this focus from Seagate will result in Momentus XT drives with a much larger (reasonable) cache. Most likely the company may even think of moving to MLC flash to keep the costs to a minimum to allow more value compared to its predecessor models or even maybe a HHD with 32+ GB of either MLC or TLC flash NAND.

For those who want to get their hands on a 7200 RPM mobile drive, they can do so until 2014. Few retailers and OEM partners should have a reasonable amount of stock depending on the availability and the location.

Do you think the new plans from Seagate is a healthy one? Or do they need to speed up their process and jump in the already crowded SSD bandwagon??

7200 RPM drives run hotter and have a tendency to have lower capacity compared to 5400 RPM drives. Yes they are faster, but not compared to SSDs. There’s room for a larger circuit board on most drives produced today, so making the move to hybrid drives makes sense.